Thanks for the kind words :) I do try hard to "keep the spirit" as much as I can. Like everyone on HN I need to balance that with many other things, but I figured out a few lines of Go + a heroku app wouldn't be too time-consuming :)

It's not.
The "author" simply stole towel.blinkenlights and wrapped it in golang. I bet he updated himself to senior go engineer on linkedin after this.
None of the "cool" stuff in this is martinraison's work.